Monday, 24 June 2013

A New Name

Answering a call for help on Twitter that had come from one of the Vocaloid world's significant talents, whose standard of English was, he felt, not serving him well enough to write the lyrics for his latest song (celebrating Vocaloid GUMI/Megpoid's fourth anniversary), I offered to proofread what he devised and suggest corrections.

This offer was swiftly taken up and I tweaked (without detracting from the artistic aspects) the first verse, first bridge and refrain that he had written thus far.

Then, unexpectedly, I was granted editing access to the online lyrics document and asked to contribute. I hadn't expected to be that much a part of the composition process!

In the end, after a couple of minutes reading again the words that were there, and a few blank minutes more while I tried to get the feel of what the composer was trying to convey (along with a couple of explanatory tweets from him, which helped), I actually wrote the second verse and the second bridge in their entirety, based on the shape, style and metre of the first verse and bridge.

I had come up with something really quite straightforward that I thought might be just a useful starting point, but he was so pleased with my efforts that he accepted them straight away, flashing messages such as "Very good!" on the document before deleting them. The resultant song, Celebration, can be heard here, sung in English by GUMI (Megpoid).

Suspecting that my original offer is likely to be taken up again in future, and that I might find myself being a kind of lyricist for other words, I decided that the credit I had been offered should perhaps be for a pseudonym in the style of Vocaloid contributors. I am by no means a Producer, so the -P suffix is not appropriate, but I thought that perhaps I could introduce a -L suffix for 'Lyricist'.

Thus I am to be known on this and any similar future efforts as JWard-L – which I hope is not thought to be pretentious, as it's simply tipping my hat to established conventions and making it clear (when the new suffix becomes more widely known, as I suspect it will) that I am not a Producer, but something much more lowly.

Let's be completely open about this: my contribution to Celebration forms only a small (however useful and timely) part of the overall production, which included composition, 'studio tricks' and uploading in both sound-only (as above) form and as a video with the lyrics captioned, which is currently being worked on. I shall no doubt embed it here once it has been completed and uploaded...

UPDATE: Here it is, a couple of days before the Vocaloid fan-base celebrates GUMI's fourth anniversary on the 26 June...

Who knows? Perhaps this could be the start of a new career for me, and I might even write some music as well. I have written a few simple tunes in the past, which have impressed those with whom I've shared them (or perhaps they were just being polite to me!) so I suppose anything is – just about – possible...